Maestro Felix Bertalan
Family history Felix Bertalan was born Laszlo Szep, the youngest of six children in a family of Magyr homesteaders who settled in the peninsula in the northeastern region of the Sea of Angels, in an area previously occupied by Old Ungren and its surrounds. Although the Szep and their neighbours maintained the proudest traditions of Magyr feudal lords (such as building extra walls, wearing long moustaches, holding tribal councils, surveying lands to make sure borders were maintained and bickering with each other) it's perhaps important to note that the family never held any official titles within the Empire, nor were they recognized as lords (or even castellans!) by the Magyr community east of the mountains. The reason for the former is quite evident: the fact that it was/is the domain of the Pit Fiend of Ungren and the site of the most defining and destructive event for the followers of Yrzabel were reasons enough to keep the imperials from regarding the wasteland to the northeast as an official part of the Empire, let alone bestow that land on any feudal lord. The reason for the latter is that up until some hundred and twenty years ago (which is considered recent enough by the Magyr), the Szep were ''[[The Tigani|tigani]]'', a word that is still said in hushed tones in polite company. It was perhaps owing to that gypsy heritage that the Szep never bothered to clue in to the reason why perfectly serviceable lands were abandoned for so long. Neither did their clansmen Peto and Kemeni, who also settled nearby. It is not that they were not followers of [[The Church of The Living God | the Church]] -- quite the contrary. The Szep had long ago abandoned their pagan ways: they even had a chapel and a chaplain, who did weekly readings of the Book of Rebellion (except, naturally, during planting and harvest seasons), and saw that all the important Church holidays were properly celebrated. Rather, in the manner of many provincial Magyr converts, they cheerfully skipped all the obscure and downright gloomy metaphors of the evil of creation in favour of the epic narratives of conquests and descriptions of important heroes involved in the same. This is also not to say that the Szeps simply turned a deaf ear to the rich lore that proclaimed these places to be diseased and haunted, with strange occurrences and evil air. In fact, if one were to mention such a thing to a Szep or a Kemeni, they would likely respond with a solemn nod and a long diatribe about the blight that had destroyed their rye crop last year, and the fact that their best cow had miscarried not once but twice in the summer, and the rumour that both cousin Krisztoff and uncle Bartu have an unfortunate preference for male company -- all of which could hardly be a coincidence. And yet, nothing short of a charging horde can ever displace a Magyr homesteader from their keep; thus their life in the region continues quite naturally, since no charging hordes have manifested themselves in a hundred and twenty years. Felix and Thea Bertalan Thea Bertalan is always introduced as Felix's younger daughter, but very few know the astonishing truth. Thea actually is Felix's sister (born Mariska Szep), five years Felix's senior. Feeble-minded and blind from birth, and a fifth child in a family with four healthy siblings, Mariska did not suffer from any high family expectations placed on her. She was expected to perform whatever simple chores she could do, but otherwise was left to her own devices. When her little brother was born, however, she took great interest in the baby -- Laszlo's earliest memories were of playing with his older sister, whose infantile simplicity and a genuine love for her sibling made her a perfect playmate. As Laszlo grew up, the roles reversed somewhat, as now it was his turn to be his sister's "older" brother, a role the 10-year old bore with grudging compliance. One day, while he was shirking his responsibilities to play ringtoss with his peers, Mariska wandered off and got lost. A search party found her three days later in what looked like an abandoned well on the outskirts of the Szep property, incoherent and feverish Ridden with guilt, Laszlo spent day and night by his sister's bedside, as she battled for her life for several weeks to follow. As she slowly came to a mend, her fevers and seizures subsided, but hallucinations and wild mood swings never did. Formerly a very obedient and easy-going girl, Mariska changed abruptly into a raving lunatic, and a danger to herself and others. She could weep uncontrollably for days, but then lash out at the slightest provocation, or attempt to kill herself. The only one who seemed to have any sort of pacifying effect on her was Laszlo, and so the boy was now faced with a choice to either lock his sister in her room forever or become her constant steward and companion. Laszlo chose the latter. As Mariska quickly became overwhelmed with crowds, Laszlo took up ranching cattle and took his sister along with him. Long solitary treks through the rolling hills proved therapeutic, and over time the girl's madness gave way to periods of unprecedented lucidity. And yet, it was those periods of lucidity that gave Laszlo the most alarm. Thea (for that is what Mariska now called herself) told fantastical and disturbing stories she could not have possibly known, in sophisticated detail her feeble intellect could not possibly account for. She gave names to places that seemed nothing more than wasteland, as if she recognized them from her past; referred to people neither of them had met, and quoted writings in a language neither of them knew. More bizarre yet, when she chose to, Thea was no longer blind. Laszlo kept Thea's transformation secret from his family, but used the excuse of long forays into the surrounding hills to learn as much as he could from his new companion -- who was still his disturbed sister, but at the same time was so very much more... Wanderings Felix almost never talks about his early travels in the ruins of Old Ungren, but he documented much of what he encountered in great detail in his journals. Some of those journals made their way into one of the Academy’s many libraries (under circumstances soon to be explained), and from there, along with a number of other works, into the private library of one Jusuf “Quod Homo” (under circumstances largely unexplained). The following is an excerpt from a collection of entries entitled “Apocryphal Essays on Demons and Angels, Vol VII”. *** For a few months I have been looking for a way to extend those brief periods of sightedness and borderline sanity that sometimes overcome Thea. The answer had turned out incredibly simple, but I have only arrived at it by chance. Today at breakfast I was playing with an apple, when I noticed Thea watching me most intently, as I was making it disappear as if into thin air and reappear in surprising places. She asked me how my “magic” (odd word, I have to inquire about the meaning) worked, and I showed her. It is a simple enough trick, requiring only token dexterity and the ability to redirect the attention of the audience away from the object for long enough to perform some simple manipulations. Yet, Thea maintained focus for the entire morning as I taught her the juggling act, which is unprecedentedly long. As she practiced making the apple disappear into her sleeve, she began talking about The Handsome One again, a recurring character in most of her stories, disjointed and odd as they may be. However, this time when I asked her questions about him, she was able to answer me calmly, rather than shut down in panic, or begin clawing at her face again and rocking in place. After a couple of hours of perfectly civil conversation she fell into a deep sleep, as talking seems to wear her out. I am, on the other hand, energized and encouraged by this event, and eagerly looking forward to more. Of course, the burden on me now is to come up with more tricks... *** Haven’t had a chance to write for some time now -- 10 calvings in twice as many days, all of them at night, and as a result we haven’t slept very well. On the other hand, I have been able to paint a more or less coherent picture from the rambling and sometimes contradictory stories Thea tells me now almost nightly. The price of these stories is as cheap as it is innocent: handkerchiefs that dance seemingly on their own, field mice to be found in my hat or in my ear, quail eggs regurgitated out of my mouth, as well as the privilege to wipe the newborn calf with burlap and a cup of the first sweet milk that comes out of the udder after the calf begins to suckle. My suspicions from before meet with more and more affirmation -- that these stories are not a product of my sister’s disordered imagination, but real knowledge and real experience that Thea feels the need to share. For instance, I believe she understands now that I don’t speak the strange language she seems to prefer, and thus communicates to me in the common tongue, so that I may follow along. Occasionally, she even halts her narrative to explain the meaning of those words she cannot translate. I now recognize them, but pronouncing them is difficult for me -- the abundance of hissing and explosive sounds is too challenging for my inept mouth. I shall write down here what I have heard from memory before the details escape me. It seems I’ve had the definition of “magic” mostly right -- it refers to the act of achieving an effect that the mind knows to be impossible through machinations that are clever and not apparent. Apparently it used to be a big thing wherever Thea is from, and far more in vogue than it is now. Furthermore, it was used for many more purposes than simply entertainment: to heal and to harm, to build and to destroy, to reveal truths and to deceive. Many folks back then knew many different magics, but the Handsome One knew more than most, and was better at them than anyone else. It is my understanding (and Thea confirms it to be true) that particularly powerful and clever magics require an expensive and elaborate setup, so naturally the only people who could really afford to do magics were Lords and Princes, and in this the Handsome One was also outstanding, as he was wealthy beyond all measure. Now, one thing that Thea keeps talking about that is still confusing to me, but I’ll write it down anyway. She claims that to learn magics and to perform them requires sacrifice (she uses a foreign word for it), a price paid in the form of ... (again, a foreign word, but it means roughly a withering, or a suffering of an individual.) This, incidentally, leads me to believe that my magic is either different or insufficiently powerful. Although, perhaps not, as the other day I have accidentally swallowed a sizeable quail egg, shell and all, and the consequences were less than pleasant. I mentioned this to Thea, but could not get any answer out of her but laughter. I don’t think it’s the same thing. Anyway, as a direct result of this feature of magics, those practitioners who chose to pay the entire price themselves did not fare very well. Every spell weakened them considerably, and they could only cast a certain number of them before they were permanently crippled or driven insane by the resulting withering of their body and mind. And so, almost all practitioners of magics (or at least all that lived to tell the tale) outsourced part of the suffering onto others by performing a specific ritual. A part of the price still had to be paid by the performer, but the brunt of it was paid by whatever unfortunate being that was chosen to be the sacrifice. (There are many questions I still have about the nature of sacrifice and suffering, but I am reluctant to ask them of Thea. Something in the way she speaks about them that makes me certain that she had experienced far more than her share.) There were many rituals developed to achieve the same effect -- of enhancing magics through sacrifice and suffering. Some required long elaborate preparations, others could be accomplished more quickly “in the field”, but the following rules applied to all of them to some degree: greater enhancement of magics required more prolonged and more acute suffering, and the suffering of a willing victim was far more powerful than that of an unwilling one. As most of the practitioners of magic were powerful people in their own right, getting a hold of victims was not a big problem for them. Many had entire dungeons full of prisoners for those purposes, some simply forced their subjects to become victims, others waged war on their neighbours to gain prisoners. A few craftier magic-users invented new ways to inflict the most intense and the most prolonged agony on an individual -- thus some spells could be enhanced by only one victim, where they previously required a dozen, simply by the virtue of the intensity of suffering. The craftiest and the most cruel of those lords manipulated circumstances on purpose in such a way that the victim went to their fate willingly. In this science the Handsome One was the craftiest and the most efficient of all. *** The last few days have been really good. We have been camping in a pasture of buttercups, which make the milk from the cows sweet and creamy yellow. Entire life seems to be filled with sweetness -- even more so today, for I have stumbled upon a beehive and treated us both to a honeycomb. As we were enjoying our supper, I have finally mustered the courage to ask Thea about the withering. To my surprise, she seemed almost relieved that I asked, as if she has been wanting to talk about the very same thing. I now wish I did not ask. Thea seems to know a lot about pain; some of what she says is so technical and detached it is disturbing to hear. Some of it is disturbing for other reasons -- it is almost certain to me that she has experienced every degree of this effect. I’ll try to reproduce most of what she said, even though I shudder at the images that persist in my head. For the first time I have been given a glimpse of the horrors that have damaged Thea so. Physical pain is the most base form of inflicting suffering, and one that is the most unreliable. For instance, women at the birthing bed are able to withstand pain without any suffering, cripples and old folks can learn to enjoy life filled with constant pain, and practitioners of the sexual arts can even learn to inflict pleasure through pain. Furthermore, there are many techniques that serve to otherwise disconnect the physical sensation of pain from actual suffering. The only time physical pain is effective and reliable as a fuel for magics is when it is inflicted on the innocents, most notably children and adolescents, who experience life almost entirely through physical sensation. Early magic-users inflicted suffering on a greater number of victims that was really necessary, as an insurance against this very nature of physical pain. Over time it was discovered that pain was a more reliable form of suffering when it was accompanied by fear, for instance, the fear of what was happening, or the dread of what was to come. Master torturers delved into the most sinister recesses of their imagination to devise an enormous variety of torture machinery, and the building of large torture chambers, whereby victims always saw what they were about to experience before they were subjected to it. As this practice has become more widespread, it was discovered that often far more potent than physical pain was the anguish of helplessness, for example, the anguish of seeing someone you love in pain and being unable to help. In the castles of the most depraved of magic-users entire families were forced into the torture chambers, so that the parents were able to witness the pain of their children before enduring it themselves. But by far the most potent type of suffering was discovered and utilized by the Handsome One -- the suffering of those who were forced to inflict suffering on those they loved, or to destroy what they held dear. The torture chambers of the Handsome One had no torturers, as the machines themselves forced the victims to inflict pain on each other. But that was not potent enough for the Handsome One, for he invented the most elaborate and intense torment of all: the suffering of those who inflicted pain on their loved ones willingly, and with full knowledge of the consequences of their actions. I cannot help but think of this now. The very potential of such evil to exist is drawing all enjoyment from the golden sunset that now lights up the buttercup meadow. I shall not sleep well tonight. *** I suppose my mood as of late is uncharacteristic enough that it was able to penetrate even Thea’s lunacy. She offered to brush my hair today, which she hasn’t done since before her illness, almost 4 years ago to the day. I am grateful and hopeful that the creature she has become is still in some part the loving sister I used to have. I realize I was wrong in thinking that periods of lucidity were associated with a less troubled, more rational experience for Thea. As much as I am intrigued by the mystery of her remarkable memories, I find it is only once her eyes cloud over that she becomes capable of grace and compassion. It is only when she is blind that she delights in nature’s creatures and, indeed, in my affection for her. Ironically, the Thea that can remember the past long before we were born does not remember what living feels like, or what it is like to love. Part of me prays that she never sees again -- and yet, and yet... Part of me thirsts for the stories she tells, stories which I feel are just outside the current grasp of my understanding, one question away from becoming clear. That same selfish part of me is aching for a companion my poor sister can never be -- one blessed with insight and experience and intelligence. She spoke of the Handsome One tonight again. I’m beginning to wonder what their relationship was -- she seems at times almost proud of his accomplishments like a teacher would be; and yet when I ask, she cannot find enough curses for him. With a mix of pride and detached horror, she told me of the magic of Contracts, an entirely new branch of magic that the Handsome One created all on his own, when he was no older than I am now. Apparently, magic can be made to affect the nature of all things -- even weather, even death -- but there is one limitation to magic: for whatever reason it cannot be used to compel any person to any particular course of action. What we do is our own. The magic of Contracts came the closest to circumventing that limitation. It is a form of magical bondage (? foreign word), originally made to deter people from breaking oaths of fealty to their lord, particularly when finding and punishing them was either inconvenient or difficult, such as was the case with spies. The establishment of a Contract requires a ceremony where the signatories agreed willingly to the specific consequences of breaking the bonds (usually those included death, but not always). Now, at first this magic was considered only marginally useful. Magic-users were usually powerful lords, who had other time-tested and entirely mundane ways of controlling their subjects, and would not waste valuable magical resources on a trick such as this very often. And yet, the Handsome One -- I feel funny calling him that, but Thea refuses to call him by name -- he did far more than use the magic to his advantage; he made an art of it, the way he did everything else. What he did was make the use of magic available to non-magicians, to average folks, who never had to truly learn how to perform magic, but could instead make use of it through properly triggered and delayed magics, or through special items that could make certain magics happen on their own. The Handsome One, of course, made it available for a price, a useful non-magical service of some kind, and that price was always written into a magical contract. On the surface, it seemed to be a foolish deal for the Handsome One to make, to trade magical services for “mundane”, that is, non-magical ones, especially since he had enough wealth and power to buy any service he desired. But in the end, it all came back to sacrifice, the true price for magic. First of all, each contract was written in such a way as to make the penalty for defaulting on the contract to be an especially unimaginable torture, and the magic that was given as a part of the contract was always set up in such a way as to allow the Handsome one to use the suffering of the unfortunate debtor as a sacrifice for his purposes. But it went further than that -- a cunning strategist, the Handsome One manipulated the circumstances in such a way as to make the mundane service particularly loathsome to whomever was bound to perform it; for example to make what they cherished be destroyed as a direct result of what they were obligated to do. And so, no matter what happened in the end, whomever struck the contract with the Handsome One ended up fueling his magic through a suffering, either through magically induced torment, or through the personal anguish of willingly destroying what they held dear. Moreover, in either case, the victim went to their fate willingly, with full knowledge of the consequences, making the sacrifice that much more powerful. With great artifice and cunning, which characterized everything he did, the Handsome One went on to wind and unwind intrigues and political machinations within his own court with the use of carefully conceived magics. In time, he needed no more torture chambers, which he considered dated and inelegant solutions. Rather, his torture chambers spanned now entire castles, entire cities, even. Instead of wretched prisoners, they now were filled with ambitious folk craving for the edge magic could provide, and using that power only to destroy everything they held dear, and ultimately, to destroy themselves. But, of course, since each individual under contract had to follow their path willingly, getting the right amount of sacrificial victims at the right time was no longer as simple as setting up a torture chamber. And so the Handsome One developed a meticulous schedule and a way to keep a careful record of balances, which were all necessary for a steady “crop”; a system of loans and repayments of magic. Thea claims that the fascinating books he wrote on the subject are still used to this day by the mercantile peoples across the sea, who have a similar way of lending moneys and trading goods. I told her that it seems to me a far more humane method, at least compared with the torture chambers she described earlier. She looked at me funny, but didn’t say anything, except that the Handsome One thinks so too, that he considers himself quite a humanist. I don’t really know what to make of this, the way she looked at me when she said it, and the way she used the present tense gives me the chills. I am afraid to ask, but I also know that this will not stop me next time...” Miskoltz The Touched The Circus